It’s the second entry in our ongoingÂ League of Legends design values! Last time we had environment and clarity designer Richard “Nome” Liu go in-depth on why Clarity is important in League of Legends. Up this week is Riot Games’Â Vice President of Game Design, Tom “Zileas” Cadwell, here to talk to one of League’s most central themes: the pursuit of mastery.Â

Zileas has been a part of Riot Games for a long time and he’s actually the one who first introduced several of the terms used in our design values series â€“ like Counterplay. Today, however, Zileas will be focusing more on mastery as it relates to every design decision we make in League and why it’s so important to the game as a whole. Onward!

Players are driven to play different game genres for different reasons. In MMOs, it might be a feeling of progression or social achievement. In single-player, story-focused games, it might be about immersion, or making your way through a deep narrative. In the MOBA genre, we believe the main thing that motivates players to stick around isÂ the pursuit of mastery.

Whether you’re trying to be the best League player in the world or you’re just picking up on how to last hit, playing League of Legends is about continually growing and becoming a better player. We believe that players who play League are seeking mastery, and our design philosophy is deeply tied to this idea. For our part, we hope to make a player’s journey endlessly rich and fulfilling; someone who adapts quickly and instinctually should be rewarded as much as the one who spends days figuring out the most optimal path forward – both are pursuing mastery in their own unique ways.

Personal expertise is the direct skill you bring in controlling your character to win a fight or earn gold. Itâ€™s your ability to last hit, execute a basic combo, dodge and land skill shots, or make an informed decision in a fight. Some of the ways we can support personal expertise include:

Creating optimizationÂ paths forÂ championsÂ is a design strategy we’ve spent more time on over the years. When we design or update champions, we ask if there are multiple levels of mastery possible â€“ places where a player can fine-tune their skills to become even better over time.Â Yasuo and his passive, Way of the Wanderer, is a good example of growing mastery, where maximizing Flow through movement and ability use â€“ and ensuring that large flow increases aren’t ‘wasted’ on a full bar â€“ can separate the good Yasuos from the great Yasuos.

Rewarding consistent demonstrations of skillÂ is an important philosophy for us, and this means smoothing out cases where this isn’t true. As an example, system overhaulsÂ are large projects that try to build more potential for mastery.Â We continue to look at League and ask ourselves: when and where are players unable to use their skill to shine? And where these problems exist, is there a way we can fix it?

Here are some examples from the 2014 pre-season changes where we made system overhauls to reward consistent skill:

Reducing team snowballing allowed players to win more often via their skill than their stats. When teams snowball out of control prematurely it becomes impossible for the opposing team, even with amazing play, to recover. On the other hand, a really ‘fed’ single player can still be focused and killed.

Stronger support scaling allows support players to continue to show their skill into the late game, rather than being overshadowed by the rest of their team in importance. When your power level is too different from other players in the game, even highly skilled players canÂ feel like they’re not making a difference.

Counterplay,Â which will be further detailed by Morello in another blog, is the philosophy of designing champions to be challenging to master for both the player playing themÂ andÂ the opponent trying to beat them. When two champions fight, we want nuance, thought, and timing to matter inÂ bothÂ directions, which means the best player should win. You’re only as good as the opponents you can beat, and a champion that lacks counterplay is one which, if executed perfectly, leaves their opponent with shallow or nonexistent response choices.

Â Â

Teamwork is the ability to read a teammate’s intentions while also giving cues in turn, or the ability to stay positive when setbacks occur, or the ability to do what’s best for the team at all times.

We design for teamwork in two major areas: teamplay and team incentives.

TeamplayÂ is a design philosophy similar to counterplay, and Statikk will be going more in-depth in his dev blog. In short, if a particular strategy or set of abilities become stronger with increasingly effective team coordination, teamplay is there. At a basic level, this means that we have to design in a way where your teammates need to care what you’re doing, and react to it. To do this, we try to make abilities, like Thresh’s Dark Passage, which greatly increase in power when the team collaborates effectively.

Team IncentivesÂ encourage players to play as a team. Basic systems like assist gold are an example of this, as are objectives like towers, dragon and baron. We’ve also positioned all of League of Legendâ€™s out-of-game rewards and ranked play (wins/losses) entirely around team success in order to reward players for playing as a team. This has the final effect of helping players understand that the path to masteryÂ mustÂ involve the mastery of teamwork.

Adaptability is both your ability to learn and respond to new ideas, new threats and new changes, along with your ability to play in a variety of styles. Different players are adaptable in different ways. Some choose to pick up a large number of champions, while others spend that time deeply mastering one along a variety of builds. We try to support both, but fundamentally believe that to pursue mastery in League is about being an adaptable player.

Our primary method of rewarding adaptability is throughÂ system and play balance changes.Â We aspire to keep as many champions as possible viable at a competitive level (to mixed success, admittedly), and also spend a lot of time trying to increase the amount of viable team-level strategies. The better balanced the game is, the more we can reward players who remain adaptable against a wide breadth of threats, and similarly reward them for investing time in learning to play less-popular champions and strategies.

We’re committed to continuing to improve the potential for mastery in League of Legends, and look forward also helping you understand the ways we can achieve this goal (or give us feedback if you feel we’re not!). We fundamentally believe a game where youÂ knowÂ you’re getting better with effort is also a game that’s rewarding to play. We also hope you’ll remain committed to your own mastery â€“ and that this blog can serve as a reminder to challenge yourself to master new skills, champions and strategies!

Â Tom “Zileas” Cadwell

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me atÂ @NoL_ChefoÂ or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

Frost-chilled days give way to colder nights, but the warmth of Snowdown calls together kindred spirits and foes alike. Snow Day Singed, Snowstorm Sivir and Winter Wonder Lulu have suited up in their Snowdown finest, joining the celebration along with all of the former Snowdown skins returning to cavort in the cold:

Snow Bunny Nidalee

Workshop Nunu

Happy Elf Teemo

Earnest Elf Tristana

Old Saint Zilean

Re-Gifted Amumu

Santa Gragas

Reindeer Kogâ€™Maw

Candy Cane Miss Fortune

Ragdoll Poppy

Nutcracko

Silent Night Sona

Festive Maokai

Bad Santa Veigar

Mistletoe LeBlanc

Snow Day Ziggs

Dark Candy Fiddlesticks

Toy Soldier Gangplank

Snowmerdinger

Slay Belle Katarina

But it wouldnâ€™t be Snowdown without a showdown! This Snowdown, weâ€™re excited to introduce the ShowdownÂ featured game modeÂ on Howling Abyss. Featuring 1v1 and 2v2 battles to test how well you wield your weapons in the winter chill, you can enter Showdown throughout Snowdown this year!

Returning Snowdown ward skins, plus a new addition to the ward skin line up, will light the way to the festivities with some surprises in store for mystery gifting, new skins and new icon rewards to earn. Check back withÂ leagueoflegends.comÂ for more information about the event and weâ€™ll see you on the battlefields!

The spotlights are on, the musicians are at the ready and the Spirit Rush is on. Popstar Ahri announces her presence, shooting a pulsing blue Spirit Orb across the stage. The notes surge from the speakers and seem to take on a life of their own around the pop darling. The crowd rushes the stage and Popstar Ahri charms the crowd with a night of song and dance.

No, not that one. Are games becoming more passive with less opportunities to shut down the opponent?

Where do you want snowballing to be at for it to feel like a fun mechanic?

Zileas: Ideally, we want teams to snowball less… and individuals to snowball as much or more — which is to say, reward individual skill specifically. Individual snowballing is fun, team snowballing is not. If we saw patterns contrary to this, we’d make adjustments.

Are you okay with games lasting 30 to 40 minutes?

Zileas: We like games to be in the 30-40 range. We don’t want them to be longer than before. If they are becoming significantly longer, we’d make an adjustment.

Doesn’t this length mean hypercarries like Nasus or Vayne can never truly be shut down?

Zileas: There’s nothing wrong with late game comps as a strategy that is sometimes played. What we don’t want is for long games to be the standard.

Will Riot focus on rewarding individual skill more?

Zileas: Making the game reward individual skill was actually the point of these changes. When they are finished and balanced I think that will become clear to everyone. Our players are becoming more serious about competition and the game over time, and our intent with the game is to not ‘casualize’ but instead to continue to improve the overall quality of competitive play.

We will from time to time add stuff like ARAM and One for All, but those sorts of experiences can thrive alongside the core game without damaging competitive integrity.

Why do you feel team snowball is less fun than individual such?

Zileas: This is a pretty theoretical game design argument, but bear with me.

The game result of ‘win or lose’ comes from some set of things. They have to add up to a 100% control of the outcome. Lots of things go in — team chemistry, counter-picks at champion select, mastery and rune choices, whether or not a champion is currently strong (or not), individual skill, good calls on team objectives, and so forth.

We believed that in season 3, early game kills snowballed the game but were not really super ‘skillful’ compared to other factors in the game. We also thought that a few good early plays on towers could sometimes secure the game — and a few actions in isolation will be more random than consistent play. So, we decided to reduce the importance of certain early game actions that will tend to snowball teams (Tower kills, dragons, first bloods in the jungle fed to a ‘snowballey’ lane — which is honestly a somewhat random, not as much skill-oriented result). From this, we expect that the importance of everything else to go up… because it has to add up to 100%, and we just subtracted something out.

So, by reducing team snowball early game, you must be increasing the importance of individual skill (along with other stuff).

Additionally, the gold changes we made should make it more possible for a support or jungle player to be the star player of their team.

An analogy I’d make is — would the game have more or less skill if we flipped a coin at the beginning of the game and gave 500 gp to the winning team? Obviously, that would still be ‘balanced’ but would be a less skillful game. By cleaning out stuff that over-rewarded relative to the difficulty of doing it, we improve the relative rewards afforded to the things we all agree are important. Also, by making the game tend to reward consistent actions over a period of time, we will tend to favor the more skillful player.

Wasn’t first blood due to a level 1 invade an example of skillful play?

Zileas: It IS a skillful play. It’s not a coin flip. However, it was over-rewarded relative to other skillful play that occurred in games. It would be sortof like if you made the first shot made in basketball be worth 10 points instead of 2 — still skill-based, but will tend to cause more random outcomes and reward the better team with a win less frequently. This has the same net affect on the frequency with which ‘the best team wins’ as adding a small coin flip test.

Does that make sense? By bringing this back in potency a bit, we preserve the potential for people to utilize the skill that DOES exist there without washing out other skillful actions… Bringing them into balance essentially.

Conclusion: Goals for Preseason

Morello: We only really want anti-XP snowball in the long-term. We’re watching this on the team-snowball level (team snowballing not good, personal is) but you need the ability to get an advantage that closes a game.

Average game time is up a bit – this is something we worry about too. I doubt everything is “right” in the world on this, but we need to dig into specific causes after today’s hotfix.

Single Posts

Morello: So far, we have not seen this be true. Some data we have so far:

* Traditional support characters’ winrate is almost unchanged. (Less than 1% delta up or down)
* Other common duo-laners (Annie, Zyra) are unchanged in winrate. Relatively, their winrate is similar to before…meaning this delta is not changing that equation so far (though some changes may be needed as they might have been in S3).
* The two exceptions are Taric (up ~4%) due to new scaling being really strong on him, and Janna (down ~5%) due to global passive change. We’ll likely buff Janna’s core skills a good amount to compensate (woo!)

This is only a few days of data, but right now, the gold delta has had a low effect on general performance (and in this stuff, deltas matter more than absolutes). We do have some hotfix changes to Brace and Jungle coming in today, but supports and bottom lane are actually looking generally more healthy so far based data points.

Ransom: That’s the beautiful thing about the circumstances Yasuo and Riven find them in. The relationship could go any number of directions. It could be a pure rivalry, or it could be a rivalry that turns into a romance, or it could go somewhere else entirely. But to call it a pure rivalry or a pure romance is missing the point. The point is, the relationship is COMPLICATED and provides plenty of fodder for drama. As a fan of our universe, this ambiguity appeals to me. It’s a grown-up vision of human relationships and not a Disney one.

New Mastery Icons

End of Season 3 Icons

Haunted Zyra

Ingame model

Officer Vi

Sultan Gangplank

Victorious Elise

Turret Indicators

Â Iniquitee:Â Hey PBE Community!

As a part of our effort to go back and take a look at what itâ€™s like to learn League of Legends for the first time, weâ€™re taking a look at turrets. Turret behavior is one of the most confusing things for new MOBA players to pick up and the average player tucks a lot of executions under their belt before they learn when and why a turret attacks them. Even more experienced players can take months or even years to learn the exact range of a turret so they can perfect the complicated dance of turret diving and breaking aggro.

Turret Indicators are a new addition in 3.13 that aim to teach players how turrets behave as a natural part of playing. When youâ€™re near a turret, a ring appears on the ground to show you its exact range. The ring changes color to let you know when it is and is not safe to be near the turret, and when youâ€™re in range and under attack the ring changes color and pattern to tell you the exact moment you draw aggro. Our goal was to be clear without being too noisy, and weâ€™d love to hear how you think we did.

When this feature goes live,Â it will only be available in Co-Op vs AI and training modes like the tutorial and custom games against bots. This is a learning tool for players of all levels, but we think that once youâ€™ve graduated to PvP, the training wheels come off and itâ€™s time to get serious. If you donâ€™t like the look of the indicators or want to measure your understanding of the range on the fly, weâ€™ve added an option under the Game tab in the options menu for you to turn them off. We hope that youâ€™ll play around with them and let us know what you think!

The sun sets and darkness creeps in, candlelight flickers and fires burn out. The Harrowing is nearly upon us. Whether exploring an old tomb or getting decked out to deck some criminals, terrifying and surprising storytelling comes alive with new skins for Zyra and Vi. Haunted Zyra and Officer Vi headline a cast that includes all of the former Harrowing skins.Â As announced last Thursday, skins that were previously categorized as Limited Edition are now legacy and will also be retrieved from the vault.

Here’s the list of all of the legacy skins that’ll be available this Harrowing:

Mundo Mundo

Pumpkinhead Fiddlesticks

Kitty Cat Katarina

Zombie Ryze

Lollipoppy

Nosferatu Vladimir

FrankenTibbers Annie

Definitely Not Blitzcrank

Bewitching Nidalee

Haunting Nocturne

Headless Hecarim

Haunted Maokai

Underworld Twisted Fate

Headmistress Fiora

Pirate Ryze

Zombie Brand

But the Harrowing is more than just dressing up and terrifying your foes, we’re also bringing back all five Harrowing ward skins and unveiling five new summoner icons to earn throughout the event. And it wouldn’t be the Harrowing without another mystery or two. This year, it’s the debut of mystery gifting. When you give a mystery gift, your purchase unlocks a random skin for a champion your friend owns. All skins in the store plus a selection of legacy skins are fair game, so your friend could end up with a legendary or even ultimate skin!

The Harrowing launches in an upcoming patch, so check back withÂ leagueoflegends.comÂ for more information about the event and we’ll see you on the battlefields!

Is the enemy team’s composition dependent on ours?

Â Lyte:Â Your team will be faced with a completely random composition. As a scientist, just imagine all the data when you get to see a matrix of creative, unorthodox compositions and how they perform against all other compositions…

I’m excited.Â

How can I see what composition the Team’s leader wants to fill?

Â Lyte:Â We’ll release more information as we go to PBE, but basically as a team leader, you get to setup your own team composition.

For example, as a team leader, I was able to setup the following today:

Fighter – Top
Support – Top
Marksman – Mid
Mage – Bot
Mage – Bot

Once I’ve determined my team composition, I lock in, and the system begins finding players for me that are interested in playing one of those specs on my team.

How will you deal with people having different expectations for a single role?

Â Lyte:Â We agree, the system isn’t designed to communicate all intentions and absolve players of any communication. Once a Support gets accepted into the lobby, teams should chat! They should figure out what they want to do, and whether they want to do 0 CS Support, or whether it’s a kill lane. If players disagree on something, they can very easily ask the system to find them a new player or a new team.

There will be a lack of people queuing for support

Â Xelnath:Â Davin’s research showed that a fairly good margin of players want to be supports. If that doesn’t turn out to be true, then I’m confident there’s things my team can do to help make support a better experience.Â

Will we be able to see Honor badges while in Team Builder queue?

Â Lyte:Â I like the idea of showing Honor badges… in fact, we have a few ideas with what we want to do with Honor and Team Builder. But for now, let’s focus on getting the Champion Select re-design out to playersÂ

Are Champions tied to specific Roles?

Â Lyte:Â Roles are not attached to the champion, and you can choose Mage-Gragas for example. It’s also very trivial for us to add a “Roam” role, if such a role were to emerge as a popular option.

When will the chatting with your teammates be available during the teambuilding process?

Â VonBurgermeister:Â As soon as someone is in the lobby, you can start chatting. Basically you can talk strategy from beginning to end.

Simmer down a bit, I appreciate the amount of passion going on here, but that’s not justification to start attacking each other.

To explain our logic on the passive:

There were concerns the super high spell pen lead to poor counter itemization

We wanted to try an alternative growth path that encouraged escalating power towards the late game (in this case boosting item purchases)

After trying it out, we actually felt like it snowballed him harder, making an already win-or-lose champion win-or-lose even harder. In fact, 15% bonus AP is really just a fancy way of saying his AP Ratios are higher than normal, that squishes squishies too hard.

We’ve totally acknowledged that being 100-0’d by his ultimate is not fun. So we’re going back to the 20% Spell Penetration passive, but this time with linear scaling, instead of geometric scaling. However, this time, it will only apply to his basic spells.

This way, if a Xerath gets out of control and snowballs into AP, you can buy MR to prevent yourself from being obliterated at a range you can’t respond, but Xerath retains his ability to poke down tanks over time. (Assuming mana enough to pull it off)

This kind of iteration can be confusing in a vacuum. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to communicate more with you directly, but I’m in pretty bad shape at the moment. While Zenon is heroically taking on the effort of finishing up Xerath, implementing new ult visuals with Bitsplosion and generally being awesome, my time is split between communicating about Xerath, handling some season 4 changes that we’ll be announcing soon and also doing some heavy work to adjust support itemization with Xypherous.

I understand your frustration with the lack of communication, but hope you understand.

That said, here’s some stuff we’re going to try out:

We’re going to try making Xerath’s E path a little more clear before it fires, make the stun scale up to 2 seconds at max distance.

This is pretty experimental, but expect to see it in Xerath V4 or V5.

[Crownface]Â Why are you reworking Xerath for the people who didn’t like playing him?

Â Xelnath:Â Crown, you *are* negative, but you have also provided useful insights and I’ve made adjustments to how I handled the character as a reflection of understanding the things you enjoyed and identified with the character.

At the same time, I am also reconciling the poor usability the character had with other play patterns that fill the same niche with greater satisfaction. I know you can’t at a glance see that you’ve had a positive influence on this rework, but you have. I greatly appreciate that your responses have been well-phrased and reflect some soul searching.

[Despia]Â Do you agree with the community’s feedback that the rework should be canceled?

Â Â Xelnath:Â We will not be cancelling Xerath’s rework. Thank you for your patience thus far, but if you disagree with this core goal, we will not be able to collaborate. I hope that you try the final reworked Xerath or can find another champion who embodies the mechanics you enjoy, who hopefully isn’t just a stealth OP.Â

[Crownface]Â Why was Lotus of Power removed?

Â Â Xelnath:Â After much review, we felt that locus as a core spell added a dramatic amount of clunkiness to the kit that requires massive amounts of over-budget AP ratios, 40% spell penetration and a nearly unstoppable stun on an 8 second cooldown to compensate for.

The amount of power Xerath required to keep that one ability was absurd. He’s utterly broken to the core. Yes, the uniqueness brought value. No, it did not justify that much power. It was only a matter of time before Xerath was given the Poppy treatment.

Instead, we are trying to figure out the healthiest, richest and most engaging parts of Xerath to keep, while keeping the important parts of his kit that were fun – e.g. a pass through base nuke. Then preserving mechanics that players recognize on Xerath, e.g. % Spell Penetration, where possible.

I just had an amazing game tonight were I survived a Varus/Blitzcrank 2v1 lane in midlane today. Yes, skillful use of Locus lead to me dodging some cool hooks. However, that wasn’t what won the game. It was that one time I landed a full combo on the entire enemy team… then the one after that… then the one after that… ultimately resulting me dealing 4x more damage than any other member of my team.

Broken AP ratios and spell penetration have been on Xerath for years. Locus has been around for years. People will never warm up to abilities that just feel that bad. I hope instead that I’ve expressed the feeling and vision of what Xerath SHOULD be to fill the long-range siege role we want to explore with him in league of legends.

Based on the other replies in this thread – I really feel like we have.

Why it’s not allowed for mutated bugs to cast spells while in the air.

[Effrim]Â Can you bring back Ziggs’ ability to cast spells during Satchel Charge’s knock-up?

Â Meddler:Â Just checked and this still works for me, it’s not something we’ve intentionally tried to remove either.

If you’re seeing certain situations where you can’t cast mid air (and aren’t CC’d by something else at the same time) let us know, will give that a look.

[orghak 11]Â Why was this feature removed from Kha’Zix but not Ziggs?

Â Â Meddler:Â The issue with Khazix was how it compressed his damage into a really small window. In Ziggs’ case that problem doesn’t apply – 99%+ of the time using Satchel Charge to land directly on an enemy to burst point blank isn’t even remotely a good play, particularly since it involves sacrificing a damaging spell. Ziggs’ casts while airborne instead tend to be getting in a parting shot while disengaging or trying for a kill shot while chasing neither of which has, so far at least, proven to be problematic, especially given Ziggs’ damage output has a fair degree of unreliability.

[McTokie]Â Follow-up: Isn’t burst what Kha’Zix is all about? Why take away the opportunity from him to burst quicker?

Â Â Meddler:Â Yup, burst is damage concentrated into a small window. That’s not to say the smallest possible window is always appropriate though. Being able to unload your full combo over 1s for example is still pretty bursty, but offers substantially more opportunity for play by the target than a 0.5s window (numbers hypothetical, not familiar with Khazix’s exact timings pre/post W change).

[Chocoboko]Â Sometimes Ziggs’ Q doesn’t cast until he has landed

Â Â Meddler:Â Doesn’t start casting until you land or doesn’t launch until you land? Even when cast in the air the Q still has a cast time, so, particularly if you start the Q cast after the halfway point of the W knockup (approximately) it’ll launch around the time you land.

The sight you gain from turrets should remain when they shut down

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â Yeah, I’ve been thinking about buffing their sight radius when shut down. Not all the way up to their full vision, but something like shaco box / teemo shroom type vision.

Any news regarding Heimer’s passive?

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â We’ve played with some new passive ideas in the thread, but we haven’t found one that’s avoided some nasty downside or another. The closest contenders were: First, a sort of spellvampy thing that procs on dealing magic damage with turrets/w/etc, but it doesn’t do much when Heimer gets zoned out. Second, a % current health variant on his passive, which is the same thing but more interesting but has the potential to get weird with tanks and feels bad when you’re behind. I had high hopes to find something good, and we still might, but I don’t feel that it’s something I’d hold Dinger back for.

At the end of the day, the current passive’s problem is how it feels–it can only be appreciated cerebrally, instead of on a gut level. I’m more ok with that on Heimer than I would be on most champions. What’s more, the aura has its supporters–some support Dingers but also people who deliberately make use of its pushing power mid. It looks weak so it’s an easy target, but it does more good for Heimerdinger than might appear at first blush.

At certain point, there’s always small problems to chase when polishing a project, but if you have no cutoff point it’ll never release. I’d like a version of the passive that feels better but does most of the same stuff, but at the end of the day I’m not willing to accept a complexity/playability penalty for a feel boost.

What’s the effective range of turrets?

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â They’re capable of operating from further away, so hopefully you’ll have more opportunities to split them up to avoid Riven Qs, Gragas barrels etc. Characters like Morgana will probably hit a point early where they can spend one big AE spell to kill a turret, but as long as they only hit one at a time Heimer can still come out ahead overall–he spends less mana and can try to punish with rockets. That’s the dream, anyway.

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â This is definitely part of why PBE is more about making sure stuff is fun and fixing bugs than it is about balancing. Balance-wise I’m more interested in stuff like, support Heimer has a bad day because disabled turrets have no vision, etc.

Will Heimer be able to support?

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â Heimer seems strongest for a mid magey role, but I’m interested in supporting support Heimer, for lack of a better word ^^

We played a while with the idea of Heimer moving turrets. In doing so, we found the main goal was to let him have some wiggle room for turrets that ended up in poor spots. Making turrets only 20 mana and giving him faster kits lategame ended up hitting the same goals a “move a turret” feature. It basically ended up being a solution looking for a problem.

And Liandris works on turret beams. I should really add a FAQ to the first post hehe xD

Why the passive CDR from Heimer’s ult is gone

Â Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â Tl;dr on cooldown reduction: If Heimer’s cooldowns need to go lower, they should just go lower. Giving him innate CDR just says “you cannot build 40%” in exchange for making sure the CDR kicks in at level 6/11/16. Since he now has reasonable power spikes at those levels due to the ult having damage numbers, there isn’t any goal left that’s solved by having innate cooldown reduction.

Final (serious) words

Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â TL;DR on Heimer balance: I’m very interested in what data comes out of PBE, but final balance will have to come from the first patch or so he’s live. The rework makes him healthy enough to keep him at a high power level, and we think he’s there now, too–but he’s also a very high skill cap champion. He needs time for players to learn strategies, etc.

I understand that a few of you feel very passionately about your vision for where his power is at, but I have to consider everyone’s viewpoint, the data at my disposal, and the big accuracy gap between balance information from PBE and balance information from live. I think it’s very important for Heimerdinger that he be viable–but making big power changes from individual anecdotes is not the way to do that.

My powers are inferior, I cannot beat teh assassinz!

Â Dannamoth:Â This is why you must build the glorious tankerdinger, destroyer of Zeds and crusher of Kassadins.

Best Passive EU

Originally Posted byÂ EvolnemesisÂ

How about this for a passive… every few seconds he’s alive, each enemy gets a flash on the screen saying ‘ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO THE DONGER!’ with Heimer’s laugh playing at the same time. This would have no real power effect, but would act as a super global taunt helping enemies get in range of his abilities by making players want to find him and rush at him with their mouths frothing in rage…

Â 20thCenturyFaux:Â Hmm… low mindshare, low power budget (no actual numeric effect!), and more awesome. This meets all my criterion! It even has counterplay, enemies can simply hide their eyes and ears in shame and also shame, respectively.

Single Posts

Â Zileas:Â Game design is a pragmatic problem solving. Decisions are often not in absolutes, and have to be made according to the situation.

While we do generally want to keep artificial RNG low (as opposed to ‘hidden information emergent “rng”‘ — I turned a corner, and didn’t know there were 3 guys there), we opted to keep crit but remove dodge for a few reasons:

1) Dodge is ‘negative’ RNG rather than ‘positive’ RNG. We found that players notice dodge a lot less as the beneficiary than as the person who ‘missed’. So, it tends to be on net not very fun.

2) The more RNG elements you add together, the more maximum RNG outcomes you get. By removing just one of the RNGs, you don’t halve the ‘worst case’ RNG outcomes, you actually more than halve them (A scenario where you are dodging attacks on you AND criting opponents).

3) Players were excited about building for crit, and weren’t excited by building for dodge.. because criting is exciting and cool.

4) We wanted some build types to scale a bit harder (not a LOT harder) than others, and the existence of crit ensures that marksmen can scale a little bit better on DPS than does defense or AP damage. (NOTE — a LITTLE bit)

Note that we also moved our crit system to pseudorandom that makes it less spikey (low chance of double crits), and reduces the impact on game objectives.

So, I feel like this is a good balance between the various considerations. In total, our artifical RNG is very, very low.

Â Morello:Â We’re not “blindly” nerfing these champions, we’re looking at damage curves for assassin-style characters overall. I’ll let the team speak to the details on it.

Overall, though, these items are pretty balanced on a number of characters, and I don’t think we’d want targeted changes to these characters to effect others. I don’t think we’d want to nerf good uses of Lichbane on TF or Ziggs just because Fizz uses it and causes problems. Lichbane is a great core item for mages who weave in auto-attacks.

DFG is…well, DFG. But historically, I’ve felt DFG is a bad item for League overall, so we might need to have some discussions about thatÂ Â DFG isn’t egregiously OP, I just worry it creates more 100-0 cases with no more interaction or skill to require it.

[Aggressive comments suggesting the removal of the current balance team]

To which you replied with:

Quote:

Originally Posted byÂ MorelloÂ

Care to educate me on what’s so bad?…

– Top lane consists of three champions and only three champions; World’s commentators even state directly, almost word for word, that because, “Renekton and Shen [were] banned and Jax was picked, there’s nothing left to be picked to oppose him.”

– Mid lane consists of champions with extremely overloaded kits (Orianna as a Xypherous champion speaks for itself, for example) and Zed; that’s it

– Bot lane consists of Vayne, Ezreal, and Corki, two of which use a remade Trinity Force (which was hypocritically adjusted right before World’s to an egregiously overpowered state for ranged carries) and the other abuses Blade of the Ruined King (an item remade and play-tested once before re-release, which arguably broke the game for weeks on end on account of its influence)

– Supports consists of Zyra, Thresh, and Sona, all of whom amount to little more than ward slaves and AoE, crowd control bots

– An impactful jungle in season two is remade at the start of season three and changes in effect cause junglers to swing wildly from being useless to overwhelmingly influential on a patch by patch basis

– Ranged carries are coddled like children whilstÂ allÂ other champion archetypes are nerfed around them

– Continuous talk of counter-play exists and yet Silver Bolts still exists, Ezreal can still abuse Iceborn Gauntlet for infinite kiting potential (RIP Skarner), there’s still only one true melee only item in the game, etc…

– Heimerdinger, Viktor, and Olaf speak for themselves; Rengar to a lesser extent (all champions that had changes, promised long ago, sit “in limbo” for extended periods of time for reasons unknown)

– A game, labelled as a competitive one, is still balanced around lower levels of play (Darius is one example)

– Ranged top laners, for the vast majority of season three, invalidated 90% of top lane champions and it took a plethora of patches before they were addressed

– League of Warmogs, League of Cleavers, League of Blade, League of Carries, etc…

– Percent of maximum health being used as a band-aid fix all over the place

Taken as a whole, season three was a catastrophe so to ignorantly suggest that there’s nothing “bad” seems a tad laughable. As stated in the title however, I truly don’t mean to sound insulting because I like this game, continue to play it, and wish for it to succeed furthermore but at this point, Riot can’t afford to be ignorant anymore and frankly there’s a lot of work to get done for season four.

EDIT: Let’s keep comments civil please.

Â Morello:Â My intent was not to imply there’s nothing to improve or fix, it was mostly a jab at the hyperbolic THIS IS TERRIBLE feel that’s based on limited data sets and popular opinion to try to position it as an attack from the OP you quote here. Let’s talk brass tacks:

League of X: Balance will fluctuate naturally, especially as we make fundamental changes to the game. The new item system (today) hasÂ better item varianceÂ than previous seasons, but we had to suffer some temporary issues to get there. This is much like when you launch a new game and it’s all over the place, except that players are much better as the game’s skill floor has gone up due to more mastery. I think there’s something to be said for needing to react faster on that stuff, though.

2) Only X of Y characters exist in Z lane: The real metrics on balance (IE: how we judge if we’re being successful or not) comes down to a combination of possible picks (total variety) and lack of domineering picks. This is both related to tournament play and what’s usable generally speaking.

Variety has been similar (~65%) this season consistently, including Worlds, but we’ve done a little worse on domineering picks, with Zed, Corki and Shen being on the must-pick list (compared to only Ezreal in Season 2). We’re going to institute methods of getting in front of this easier for this season and have learned some good techniques on how to watch these trends.

Additionally, this is only in tournament play – which we do take seriously when doing balance of course – but what that means 99% of players can play most characters and be successful. Very few characters are actually in a bad spot. Even the variety between Diamond 1 and pro games is pretty different.

3) Counterplay needs more work continuously, and counter-examples tend to speak of more work to do. Silver Bolts is a terrible example though because the countering strategically != counterplay. If Vayne is overpowered because of her target selection freedom, that’s a different topic.

So should we never try to do anything on counter-play unless we can change every champion to ensure 100% of champions are as successful as we’d like here? That seems like it creates a worse problem that chipping away at it, to me.

So if your goal is to get me to admit that League of Legends has problems we want to fix, then you got it! That’s never a hard admission to make. The work is interesting because there are so many problems to solve, andÂ it’s not possible to be finished, ever ever.Â That’s the reality of working on game health.

Reasonable conversations about game health, balance, design and other subjects that effect play are great. They’re the reason we get on these forums. But let’s also be real for a second: a large number of people think they’re an expert on balance, and frankly, very few people are (and if you actually are, I’m hiring!). That’s why we want to use reasoned conversations, structured problem-solving, data, and objective analysis to discuss these problems in detail.

As far as how balanced does the game “feel”, I agree with something here. While any gaming forum is talking about how unbalanced every game is, there’s a more balance disruption when we do season changes, and the “feeling” of how balanced the game is is risked when more must-picks appear in competitive play. And that makes sense. It’s easy to read a story that says “play this champion, or don’t show up as a serious contender,” and that obviously feels really bad. We agree and are working to address this more aggressively.

Dominion/TT changes coming in Patch 3.11, Riot show off a legendary skin for Janna, four new bundles available until August 19th, Zileas discusses game design in Morello‘s original thread, a collection of amazing champion skin sketches, courtesy ofÂ Ze Ocelot and, as always, the latest Sale!

Items

Explaining the changes

Â ManWolfAxeBoss:Â Sanguine Blade damage will be 50 base and will be available on maps that Sanguine Blade is available on.

Lulu has a very strong kit on Dominion. Hitting her ult CD will just mean that it won’t be available for every fight (Max CDR at rank 3 was 48 seconds). She will still be strong, but now enemies will have a longer engage window when they don’t have to worry about Wild Growth.

Can we have better CDR itemization for mages?

Â ManWolfAxeBoss:Â It’s comingÂ

And speaking of which, one of the things I’ve beenÂ consideringÂ doing with sweeper is making it build from Kindelgem + Fiendish Codex > 20% CDR and remove the MS.

NOTE:Â CONSIDERING

Will you keep the MS buff on Hextech Sweeper?

Â ManWolfAxeBoss:Â MS would likely be moved to another item. Would like to split up the active and MS, as having them both in one item is Mike Tyson strong. The item was originally overloaded to get people to buy it. Now that they do we need to tone it down a bit.

What is Riot trying to achieve with LoL’s gameplay?

Â Zileas:Â I would add three comments related to what Morello wrote earlier. We have a few goals that are relevant to this discussion:

1) We want to maximize the number of significant decisions someone can make in a game. Champion select is one of these, as are build choices, executions in situations, calling when to do what play, and so forth. If one decision has excessive consequences, or an early decision has too much consequence, the result can be a shallow feeling outcome, or a period of time after in which players have minimal ability to make a choice that impacts the game’s outcome. That’s not particularly strategic or interesting when it happens… Which leads me to my second point…

2) We don’t like situations in which the game is ‘decided’ but continues anyway, especially if it’s too early. This is shallow once it happens. How can strategy occur if there’s already a truly decisive advantage? If there is a decisive advantage, you should be able to just close out the game. We much prefer strong advantages that retain counterplay as they reduce certainty of win but preserve the feeling of awesomeness — we want you to be able to make your character into a monster, but we’d rather it looked like Kog’Maw: he’s a monster that can still be beat late game. Counterplay is a design discipline that allows us to preserve strategic choice and awesome plays even when champion have become incredibly powerful. And of course, honestly, if you win with your monster character despite counterplay existing, you earned that win that much more through your skill.

3) Continuous mastery is a key part of our design philosophy. We want to make sure that you can continuously learn, and that as many situations as possible that you might be in are ones in which you CAN learn. If you have a really rough lane matchup, but it IS possible to win it, you will learn to do so. Additionally, good play balance where we attach proper weightings to decisions will provide more opportunities and points in which one can improve ones play. So much of what we do is oriented around this idea of cultivating the availability for people to master the game and always improve.

Â Â WizardCrab:Â As some of you may have noticed, Riven is part of tomorrow’s sale, however the post says she’ll be on sale for 440 RP (http://beta.na.leagueoflegends.com/e…n-sale-813-816). You might note that Riven is 975 RP, and that 440 RP is more than a 50% discount. This is a mistake I made because we had hoped Lucian would be out already, and I put Riven into the sales system long before Lucian was delayed. With Lucian’s release, Riven’s price will be reduced to 880, and so 440 would have been the correct sale price had Lucian been released.

I just wanted to let you know that Riven will still be on sale for 440 RP even though her price has not been reduced yet, and will not be reduced before this sale. But the happy accident is that you don’t need to be concerned with picking up Riven right before her price drops.

Please feel free to ask me any questions if this is confusing.

What’s causing the delay with Lucian’s release?

Â WizardCrab:Â My understanding was that introducing Lucian would introduce unacceptable bugs. So we said we couldn’t put him out in the 3.10 patch cycle.

**Here’s some conjecture, since I know nothing about the actual issues with Lucian**

I’m no computer programmer, but my guess is that no one really knows exactly how long it will take to troubleshoot every interaction that a given piece of content has with every other part of our game. Especially as we add more and more stuff and try to put in unique mechanics. But when we can be confident that he won’t break the game, we’ll let you know (most likely by putting him out).

**End conjecture**

Let’s be real people. It really sucks when a new patch comes out for your favorite game and you can’t play it because of game-breaking bugs. No one wants that.

What is your opinion on LeBlanc’s current state? (click here to view changes)

Â Â Meddler:Â I know live feels she’s a bit weak at the moment and are currently looking at whether some base stat adjustments would be an appropriate fix/part of an appropriate fix. Nothing set in stone yet, she is on their radar though.

From what I’ve seen personally I’m inclined to agree she’s a bit weak, at least at the level I’m playing at, I usually play ADC or support though so I don’t have much direct exposure to her in lane to draw on. Plus, more importantly, I’m not involved that much in balance changes.

Follow-up: Have you seen support LeBlanc?

Â Â Meddler:Â Run into a few, all that I can recall were on my team though. Quite like laning with them, provided on an ADC that can take advantage of what they offer.

What are you developing for Galio’s kit?

Â ricklessabandon:Â Two-part response:
First, i’m going to give Galio mr/level in my early tests and see how it goes. I totally expect it to be fine, but ‘no promises’ and all that.

Second, Galio isn’t really supposed to be a mage counter. His kit doesn’t really have anything you’d expect on an anti-mage. Sure, he’s generally good/annoying against the du couteau house and a handful of other champions, but that’s more due to bulwark being particularly effective versus periodic and multi-hit damage than his overall kit. That said, people definitely think of him as resilient against magic so i think it will be worthwhile to make that aspect of him a bit more pronounced.

Craving something new at champ select? Get fed on these limited time bundles. They’re flexible in cost, meaning the final bundle price will automatically adjust to reflect only what’s new to your collection.

Gank City BundleÂ â€“Â 25% off atÂ 4300Â 3225:

Whether you’re using slingshots, knockbacks, nukes or even a dragon to open a picture perfect gankâ€”that’s teamwork, and that’s OP.

SummonerÂ Ze Ocelot shares a ton of incredible art of skins on the forums, even including some model sketches!

Ze Ocelot:Â For fun, I was working on a bunch of skin ideas a little while ago. I might as well share them now! I’ll try to keep this short and simple.

“If I want to be a concept artist in the videogame industry”…was something that kept on running through my head. But I had to actually well,Â drawÂ something that dealt with concept art. So, around 2 years ago or so, I started drawing out scenes and character sets. It might have been because of playing League when I saw some of the concept art sheets. And I thought it was amazing. As for skins, they were great for thinking about and visualizing alternate looks and stories for characters, whether they be cool, scary, classy, clever, or just plain silly.

Fast forward a tiny bit and I finally got to drawing out some skin concepts. Some of my ideas…ugh. But I still had fun drawing them all! I tried to do skins for more recent champs and I know, I’m missing a lot of champs. Because there are a lot of them.

Below are sectioned rendered splash arts I created for some of the skin ideas, similar to a mock-up loading screen.Â I do not have full versions of the splash arts; they take much longer to finish, sorry!

Attached are more skin ideas. I’ll try to do more in the future. It was super fun to draw these!